“The Union Prayer Book: Poetry in Motion”

   Well, the prayerbooks were distributed and I for one am thrilled that Beth El has not buried/given away Gates of Blue and Gates of Gray leaving Mishkan Tefilah as our only siddur. It’s good to have a choice of liturgy. This Friday evening, we will be worshipping from the Union Prayer Book, the FIRST of the Reform movement’s from the late 1800s until 1975, a little less than a century.

  For those of you not familiar with the UPB, especially if you were raised in a Conservative or Orthodox synagogue, there is a huge difference. As a matter of fact, you will think you’re in a mainstream Protestant church. It’s not that I personally believe that inasmuch as the structure of the UPB is no different than any other siddur, but the language is. 

   I refer to the selections – most of them, at least – in the UPB as “poetry in motion,” that is, they have “moved” generations of Reform Jews to truly feel what prayer should be all about, a style that is far more personal than what we’ve been accustomed to these past 45 years.

   But there is a “Protestant” feel to the music (not the lyrics) of early Reform Judaism though I must say that most Jews falsely think anything in English cannot be Jewish. They certainly can be, but our typical Shabbat songs of today are relatively new, written by Jewish composers, are in Hebrew, and “sound Jewish.” Those characteristics alone do not Jewish music make!

   While the music of Classical Reform was often written by non-Jewish composers, the lyrics of many English-language hymns are infused with Jewish concepts. Our forebears wanted to blend in with American culture for sure; their ideal was to make everyone feel comfortable in their synagogues and so they adopted the organ, most prayers read in the vernacular and limited Hebrew (very limited in most cases). But being a student of both liturgy and the Reform movement I can tell you that never was our theology in question, and this can be seen as we read one of the Shabbat (Sabbath, as is the case in the UPB) services this Friday. My sermon will also focus on the Union Prayer Book and what it says about the times in which it emerged.